The PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight continues to be a comedy of errors. In spite of numerous patches, a complete relaunch, and loads of promises, the game still performs poorly on a wide range of PCs. Even with an extra four months to tidy up the mess, the developers still can’t get the game to run reasonably well. After yet another tidal wave of negative customer feedback, Warner Bros. has caved, and is now allowing for complete refunds until the end of the year.

In a message posted on the Arkham Knight Steam community page, a Warner Bros. representative announced that every owner of the PC version will be able to return the game for a full refund. Regardless of how many hours you’ve played, you can get all of your money back until the end of the year. Did you buy the season pass as well? You can return that too, but only if you decide that you’re willing to part with the core game as well — no backsies otherwise.

Over at the Digital Foundry, the performance analysis is showing lackluster results across the board. If you’re running a graphics card with 2GB of memory, you can expect pitiful performance on anything but the lowest texture setting. Rocking a high-end card with 4GB of memory? You’re probably still better off locking the frame rate at 30fps to reduce stutter. Even running a GTX 980 and an i7-4790K, the Digital Foundry folks can’t keep the frame rate steady at 60fps. All these months later, and this port is still a massive headache.

Using the game’s built-in 30fps cap, there’s still some serious problems with frame pacing. If you’re using an Nvidia card, its proprietary control panel can solve that issue by using the half-rate adaptive v-sync option. But if you’re using an AMD card, you’re completely out of luck. If you’re just dying to play this game, I’d recommend picking up a used PS4 or Xbox One copy if at all possible. Those versions can only offer 30fps, but at least they’re consistent.

Truth be told, I can’t say I’m surprised by any of this. Last week, I reported on the re-release of Arkham Knight, the bevy of make-goods, and the initial performance issues. I recommended against purchasing the game on PC for the time being, and this just confirms my suspicions. The PC release is still on fire, and based on some choice wording in today’s announcement, I don’t think it will ever be completely fixed.

Earlier this year, I interviewed a few developers about the process of porting games. They had a lot of valuable insight on the process, but the biggest take-away for me was understanding just how complicated everything is. Even under optimal circumstances, delivering a polished port is a challenging task. And based on what we’ve heard, this scenario was far from ideal. It seems as if resources were scarce from the get-go, and the dev team has been under the gun to fix this mess in a timely manner. My heart goes out to all of the hard-working devs, but I have absolutely zero sympathy for the suits at Warner Bros. who continue to try to sell consumers a broken game. It’s inexcusable.

If the architecture of the program was not written with good maintainability and modularity in mind, this can make performance optimization anywhere between 10 times more difficult or practically impossible.

Given how most game shops are made up of less experienced programmers, the possibility of things being ideal for the devs of this game is next to 0%.

This makes your comment woefully ignorant in the extreme.

Ken

So basically, because they wrote bad code, they have a bad game, and it’s ignorant of us (the customer) to call them out on it.

The game is based on the Unreal 3 engine. A game engine that is 11 years old. A game engine that, at this point, considering they released two Batman Arkham games that were also based on the same engine, Rocksteady should have mastered by now. There is no excuse, not one acceptable reason, for why Arkham Knight should be running this badly on PC. Arkham Origins didn’t run this badly on PC when it launched, and that was a title developed by WB alone.

You say it’s ignorant to hold them to a higher standard when we KNOW they are capable of better? You sound like the ignorant one. The simple fact of the matter is, WB should not have released this game (twice) in the state it’s in. They knew it was broken, but they didn’t care. They even partnered with Nvidia to give away free copies of Arkham Knight with GTX970s and 980s. They gave copies of the game away with GPUs that couldn’t even run the game properly. What sense does that make?

By contrast, Rockstar spent eighteen months making sure that GTA V was ready for its PC debute, and it went about as smoothly as a PC launch could go. WB should take a page from Rockstar’s book and take their time with their PC ports. A smooth launch on PC, even if it’s months after a console release, is worth a lot more than a disastrous launch that gives bad publicity and costs sales.

The foolish man builds his house upon the sand.

VirtualMark

An idiotic post at best.

Zunalter

Shame, I was looking forward to seeing this game as it was actually intended to be seen, as opposed to what current consoles can push out.

Jhollman

HAHAHAHA HHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAH AHAHAHA

Jhollman

I agree, devs have not the fault for the Batman disaster, all the fault goes to that greedy and stupid suit who make all the bad depositions, his head should road!

Winston Smith

Depositions!?!? Road?! You are high and I know it

Jhollman

I know!, i mean “Desitions”. xD

Ken

Decisions

haris

Do we lose all older batman titles as well, if we refund arkham knight?

powerwiz

To funny! Its not like these goons live in a world where they can test all of this out. What a joke. The other joke is taking to the end of the year to issue refunds. They sure do instantly charge you.

Mirimon

Weird…. a complete absence of pc master race tards in here…

Phobos

Careful now, don’t summon them or you’re going to feel their wrath of nonsense bs.

skoodrae

B R A V O W A R N E R
R
A
V
O

W
A
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R

Brian Kram

The year is 2030. The biannual recall was announced yesterday. Even the most diehard fans are beginning to lose faith

PtolemyWasWrong

No worries; since we’re told there is a ‘scientific consensus’ (whatever the heck that is) about climate change, people should give up their entertainment rigs anyway and quit using precious power for gaming.

Joel Hruska

Please keep discussion threads at least marginally on topic. No one here has argued or claimed that gamers should stop playing games as a means of combating climate change. Heck, even the National Resource Defense Council, which *does* loudly activate for power-efficient consoles, has never called for people to give up gaming.

Showing up in a thread that has nothing to do with a topic and injecting a fallacious argument based on a completely different topic is the very definition of a straw man.

Caleb

Pretty sure he was being facetious

Rawr

Lol.. I took your comment as a joke and nothing of the sort serious in any manner seeing as how he’s using a PC/laptop/tablet/phablet/smartphone to types this anyway.

fortyminstofive

PC MASTER RACE oh wait wrong place…

Eric Blair

This has nothing to do with the PC, but ports. What they should do is develop for PC and THEN port it to consoles.

Mirimon

That’s exactly how it already works…. been that way since the 80’s…

SilentGal

Yes everything is created on PC, but companies are steering more to consoles, which means they take on the decision for the frame rates etc for consoles. Then we get the console ports put back onto pc where the game wasn’t designed for 60fps+

fortyminstofive

They SHOULD do a lot of things my friend. You have a fair point, but given the latest gen of consoles are basically running PC hardware, why couldn’t they just port it and have it running well??

Ken

The recommended GPU required for Arkham Knight is an AMD Radeon 7950, which is far superior to what’s found in a PS4. Yet on the PS4, Arkham Knight vastly outperforms the PC version. It seems like the game was optimized and only tested for two configurations of console hardware, not for the vast array of hardware found on PCs.

Dabil

I guess I am one of the lucky ones. This title performs gloriously on my pc. It doesn’t get a 60 fps lock, my average is 59 fps though. I have not had a single game crash, and none of the stuttering everyone complains about. I bought this last week to take advantage of the offer to get the earlier games all free since I am new to this series. Thanks for the heads up on that by the way!

I have all settings maxed and all nvidia experience options turned on except dynamic fog. I left that off because when I turned it on the performance indicator turned to yellow abd a text box informed me that I might experience stuttering.

Couple things I have noticed is that people with less than 12 gig system ram seem to be having the most problems. And for whatever reason gtx 970 owners seem to be getting the most consistent performance. Or at least gtx owners like me are the most satisfied it seems. Maybe we are just easier to please?

Ken

I think your better performance has a lot to do with your SSD. According to what I remember, WB was saying (during the first release) that the game would run better from an SSD. But most PC users don’t have those because they are prohibitively expensive. I passed on a 500 GB SSD when I upgraded my PC, because it was over 600 dollars, not to mention 500 GB is not much storage space these days. By comparison, a 4 TB HDD is only about 330 dollars.

Regardless, the PC port should have been developed for the PC hardware that is in common use, especially since WB partnered with Nvidia to give away copies of Arkham Knight with its latest GPUs.

Dabil

Go Steelers!

Kojen Ku

Why not open source the game, and let people see and fix the code and compete for the supremacy of stability, visual and frame rates.

ba78O{}

Run this game with Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer. It is running on too many draw calls or way too many vertices per draw call (eg. character and other models way too detailed).

Rawr

“In spite of numerous patches”

Excuse me but they only had like 2-3 patches (banking on 2) during the whole period of its fiasco launch release to its re-release. They did nearly NOTHING. They screw up twice and compensate nothing or rather a measly one at best. I was hoping on Season Pass (probably would upset season pass owners) or Mad Max.

I’ve stuck with them all the way through from the beginning and they still treat me (and others) like crap and offer their crap compensation to even new buyers before Nov.16th. Thank you for alpha/beta testing our game. Here’s a middle finger as a consolation prize and reward x2. Point is most of our reports/feedback go unanswered/ignored by WB. They even admitted it’s a broken mess.

Ken

They prioritized DLC over game fixes. It’s exactly what they did with Arkham Origins, which still has numerous bugs across all platforms.

Rawr

I still need to play that one. Skipped it and went straight with AK. That said, I hear it was more playable than AK at least.

Ken

It is, by a huge margin. But the story is a big bait-and-switch that I found hugely disappointing, and they tweaked the fighting to require more precise timing, and as a result, it’s very unforgiving. Some of the most useful upgrades are tied to achievements, which you can’t complete individually, they have to be completed in order, no doubling up like in Arkham City. This is especially frustrating for Predator encounters, which are tailored to work with specific achievements. If you’ve fallen behind on one, you probably won’t be able to complete it at the next one, and it starts to snowball until the only way to complete the Predator achievement track is to start a new game. Additionally, there’s a side mission that can only be completed in New Game+, an item that technically shouldn’t exist because it retcons a side mission in Arkham City, an item that breaks the fighting system and makes you practically invincible, and the list goes on.

So, to sum up, Arkham Knight might be a broken mess on the PC, but it’s a better game than Origins.

AlbiteTwins

It’s really interesting how much VRAM plays a part in performance, even on medium settings. In part of Digital Foundry’s video, they compared an R9 285 2GB and R9 380 4 GB (basically the same card, but different amounts of VRAM) and there is a huge impact on performance. https://youtu.be/KiHnM6mMbEc?t=136

Kwuarter

I wouldn’t be surprised if WB games decided to partner up with Ubisoft at one point.

Mike

It is odd that the Radeon cards are having such issues given that both consoles use AMD chips…

I have this in my Steam library; Runs perfectly @ 1080p 60hz on a single gtx 970 with all the settings at max, plus one for team green I guess! I have an older i950 chip too…

Eric Hurwitz

Black ops 3 is next.

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